Abstract: Speech and language are largely lateralized to the left cerebral hemisphere, while pragmatic competence appears to require an intact right hemisphere. Speech is known to be decoded in the brain by mechanisms engaging cortical areas within the left hemisphere, yet language experience may influence which brain circuitry is employed in processing auditory cues. The brain’s processing of information involves simultaneous activation of widely distributed neural networks. These networks allow large-scale parallel processing but also include points of convergence and sequential routing. The distribution and the time course of the momentary brain electric field topography offer a unique possibility to obtain insights into important features of the brain’s processing of information. The sequence of brain electric field topography represents the shift of the state of the brain from a representation of the input to a representation of the output. The empirical studies of human brain functional states for lexical tones processing in speech and language circumstances and experimental studies were then reviewed in order to reveal an effect of the spectral and temporal cues.